they probably deem it as not important. "Context is all you need to tell the difference, keep the font clean"

Context solves this ambiguity in texts recording a human language, but in computer or smartphone applications it is extremely frequent to not have a context that allows disambiguation.

Ambiguous characters may have been acceptable in typefaces designed before 1990, but they are certainly not acceptable for any more recent design, unless the typeface is designed for a very specific and limited purpose, e.g. for a single advertising poster, and they will never be used for rendering arbitrary texts.

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Hupriene 4 days ago | parent [-]

To be fair the designer who created the font would probably agree that for use cases like passwords or serial numbers etc. you should use a different font. That's the nice thing about having different fonts around. You can choose which one you want to use.

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adrian_b 4 days ago | parent [-]

That is a solution applicable for a document or GUI created by yourself, where you can define various styles with associated fonts and use them appropriately.

However, I see the worst offenders on various Web pages (frequently for various URLs) where I do not control the typeface, unless I instruct the browser to ignore the style sheet of the rendered Web page and use my own fonts instead, which can be tedious or create other problems in the rendered page.

	▲	mjmas 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have a few CSS overrides for some websites to turn all input boxes into monospace fonts. It is far easier to use them then.

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lucb1e 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then they can also coalesce the digit 1 into uppercase i and lowercase L because who cares right it gotta look clean. And why bother deviating from the perfect circle? The future is lowercase o, also for zeroes. Heck, why do we have the letter J anyway? Couldn't we merge that with I? It's so rarely used, it sounds iust about the same, let's iust "keep it clean"

I really can't imagine this is the thinking

	▲	BoiledCabbage 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's funny I thought out a post, wrote it in my head and then scrolled a bit further and read (where you wrote it). The only difference was I choose upper-case "G" and making it a "C" instead of "J" to "I". We can also make it match open paren as well. But yeah this whole thing seems absurd of removing the distinguishing marks on things whose only purpose is to allow us to distinguish them. While were at it N can become \ and M as well. D can become close paren. Q can become O. And entire font of just vertical bar, horizontal bar, open paren, close paren, forward slash, backslash and a circle. Just think of how clean it would look...

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eviks 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Except they're not keeping the font clean, just less legible